Catching Up With The News

MAL Raid, Covid, Schools

My apologies. I had my annual eye exam this morning, didn’t get home till noon, and having had my pupils dilated I was in no condition to work at the computer in any concerted way. Add to that the fact that Substack has been having “issues” and won’t let me publish. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a day with a variety of interesting stories.

Obviously the revelation, well, confirmation that the highest legal levels of the Zhou regime were all involved in planning the Mar-A-Lago Raid—despite claims that the WH wasn’t involved. There was never any real doubt that that was a baldfaced lie. As I explained to commenter Bebe last week, nobody at DoJ cares what some nitwit at the National Archives has to say. On the other hand, what the White House Counsel has to say, that’s a different matter. It was clear that this was a top down operation, and that the National Archives bureaucrats were following directions.

There’s not too much to say about this beyond the obvious political impact. The general public overwhelming saw this as a political hit job by a politicized FBI. This development is, as I said, merely confirmation. However, it may come as news to the public, and the reaction to shameful lying by the Zhou regime will undoubtedly deepen the public’s negative reaction.

As for Trump’s legal challenge, without wishing to sound Pollyannish, I have to rate his chances for success in the courts as better than average. The presidency is a unique institution within our constitutional system. Most of us aren’t used to thinking in those terms. We tend to think of the president, or former president, as more or less like other citizens—but it’s more complicated than that. You can get a decent, brief discussion of these issues at TGP, in a video clip from Hannity with Greg Jarrett and Alan Dershowitz. It wasn’t on Youtube so I can’t embed it, but Hannity doesn’t interrupt. Jarrett presents the Fourth Amendment (search and seizure) issues that Trump’s lawyers have raised—they’re significant. The issue of a “general warrant”—basically, a fishing expedition that lacks a specific description of what’s sought—is one that the courts will not take lightly. Jarrett also discusses the matter of whether the FBI and DoJ withheld essential information from the magistrate.

Dershowitz, on the other hand, takes up an interesting issue that pertains to the office of the presidency per se—executive privilege. The Zhou regime claims to have “waived” Trump’s executive privilege as part of making their raid possible—without consulting Trump. That, of course, also goes to the issue of using the least intrusive method available, but Dershowitz gets at the constitutional issues surrounding executive privilege. Here, per TGP, is a portion of what Dershowitz says:

Alan Dershowitz: These are very, very serious matters. The full issue of whether or not there was full disclosure to the magistrate hopefully will come out when we see the affidavit. There should be a special master appointed. This has happened in the past, a special master – can go through all the papers and decide what’s privileged. One thing that clearly is wrong is the Biden White House should not be able to waive the executive privilege of President Trump. That would make the executive privilege annulled. It would mean that no president could ever speak with confidence without knowing two years from now or three years from now all of it will be revealed by the current president. That’s just not the way executive privilege was supposed to operate. So there are lots and lots of questions, I hope they’ll be answered by the affidavit.

I’m speculating, but all of this, to me, suggests a high level of desperation animating the charge for a warrant. Simple bad judgment is the other option, but—again, IMO—there were too many people involved who should have known this could blow up in their faces. Somebody should have said, Whoa! And so I’ll opt for desperation for now.

On to Covid.

There were two important Covid Regime stories today—important because they speak to ruler - subjects relations.

Thomas Lifson at American Thinker points to a remarkable development:

Beijing imposes vaccine mandate, backs down and cancels after 48 hours due to public outrage

If that can happen in Beijing … This fits in with everything we’ve been seeing about growing skepticism regarding all things Covid. People are catching on.

And from Down Under:

Australia’s Lockdown and Vaccine Narrative Has Fallen Apart

This is a wideranging story, but here’s the part that jumped out at me, because I’ve been expressing skepticism for a long time about official stats of all sorts as related to Covid:

The Covid report from New South Wales Health for the week of July 10–16 said: “The minority of the overall population who have not been vaccinated are significantly overrepresented among patients in hospitals and ICUs with Covid-19.” Just two pages later, the same report gave the number of unvaccinated people admitted to hospital and ICU as zero. 

The sentence is repeated verbatim in the latest weekly report for August 7–13, with the number of unvaccinated people admitted to hospital just one and to ICU zero. By contrast, of those whose vaccination status was known, 98.7 percent of Covid patients admitted to hospital and 98.2 percent admitted to ICU during the week (and 84.8 percent of the dead) had received two or more vaccine doses.

Even by the standards of public health authorities across the world gaslighting the people in order to nudge them into docile – and often performative – compliance with official edicts, this level of internal contradiction of narrative with data is breathtaking.

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Professor Kenji Yamamoto of the Okamura Memorial Hospital reinforced a warning from the European Medicines Agency of the potential for frequent booster shots to harm the immune system. Another study in the New England Journal of Medicine  shows infections among double-vaccinated and boosted people can last somewhat longer. An Icelandic study showed a significantly higher probability of reinfection of the boosted. The Epoch Times reported on studies showing successive doses of mRNA vaccines can desensitize the body and teach it to become more coronavirus spike protein-tolerant.

Conversely, ‘breakthrough reports’ in the mainstream media of evidence of the deadly long-term harms of lockdowns themselves are growing. On August 18 the UK Telegraph’s science editor Sarah Knapton reported official statistics indicate that “The effects of lockdown may now be killing more people than are dying of Covid.” 

The causes are exactly what many had predicted from the start: 

• monomaniacal focus on Covid to the neglect of all other health concerns meant many ailments that are treatable with routine early screening went undetected until too late; 

• excessive test, track and trace and isolation requirements took many healthcare personnel out of circulation; 

• some people avoided consultations out of concern they would take away doctors from treating Covid patients while others avoided presenting to hospitals for fear of catching the virus there; 

• and deaths by despair and loneliness from the enforced separations from family and the fellowship of friends.

Even now, however, as Will Jones points out, there is a great reluctance to discuss the serious adverse events, including deaths, associated with and caused by vaccines themselves. Concerning safety signals continue to grow. For example, a preprint study in June by several experts analyzed data from Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccine trials. They found that the risk of hospitalization from a vaccine-related adverse event was higher than the risk of hospitalization from Covid itself. Until such time that these are properly investigated, we will lack accurate and reliable data on the scale and severity of the problem.

There’s much more.

We shift to the education front, although the first article is Covid related:

Study: The More Insane Public Schools Were About Covid, The More Parents Abandoned Them

This one can be summed up in a single picture:

https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/9535941/

Then there’s Chicago:

"F**k Wirepoints" Says Chicago Teachers Union When Confronted With Facts From The School District Itself

This is a real eye-opener:

Mike Flannery of FOX 32 Chicago asked the Chicago Teachers Union to join his show to discuss the numbers along with Wirepoints’ Ted Dabrowski.

“F*** Wirepoints,” was the union spokesman’s answer to Flannery. He used the whole word and said his answer was on the record, according to Flannery. …

Is the union so confident in its political power that it can respond to legitimate issues in such a manner?

…

The numbers we reported almost defy belief. Of CPS’ 478 stand-alone “traditional” schools, one-third of them, 150, are less than half-full, according to the school district. The 20 most empty CPS schools are only 5% to 25% full and most have abysmal educational outcomes, with  proficiency percentages in the single digits.

Manley High School has a capacity of 1,296 students but just 64 students are enrolled. There, 2% are proficient in reading and 1% in math. Just 44 students attend Douglas High School that has a capacity of 888 and their reading and math proficiency are both 0%. The list goes on.

CPS has already lost 100,000 students, or 25% of its enrollment, since 2000 and enrollment is projected to decline by tens of thousands more within a few years.

That’s in a school system that spends an astonishing $28,000 per student to cover the district’s operating, capital and debt costs, a spending number which has doubled since 2013, as we reported earlier.

It’s in a system that graduates 84% of its students though only about a quarter can read or do math at grade level.

And it’s in a system that rates the portion of its teachers as “proficient or excellent” at 100%. That’s correct, 100%.

Those numbers are real, as is the omnipotence of the Chicago Teachers Union, but how one of the world’s formerly leading cities could have let it comes to this seems to defy reality.